Headlines

Mexico's embattled construction firm ICA said on Thursday it has named Guadalupe Phillips as its new chief executive officer, tasked with its ongoing financial restructuring. ICA, struggling under a high dollar-denominated debt load and a dwindling stream of projects, is in the process of restructuring its debt through several of its subsidiaries for about 7.5 billion pesos ($391 million). Phillips, who formerly served as Grupo Televisa Vice President, was named ICA's restructuring director in January. She will report to Bernardo Quintana, president of the ICA board of directors.

Insolvent Australian industrial group Arrium Ltd's U.S. based Moly-Cop division has been sold to private equity firm American Industrial Partners for $1.23 billion, two sources close to the deal said, ending a drawn out sale process, Reuters reported. "I can confirm it is American Industrial Partners," one source said. Moly-Cop, which makes steel balls to grind ore and operates mostly in the United States and Latin America, also attracted interest from KPS Capital, a private equity limited partnerships with about $5.5 billion of assets under management.

The Pensions Regulator has begun formal legal proceedings against Sir Philip Green and Dominic Chappell that could force them to fill the £571m deficit in the BHS pension scheme, marking a dramatic escalation of the scandal surrounding the demise of the high street chain, The Guardian reported. The regulator said that after a “complex investigation” and months of talks with Green about a rescue deal for the pension scheme it was sending warning notices to the billionaire tycoon, Chappell and their companies.

Creditors of Guangxi Nonferrous Metals Group have vetoed an insolvency plan in a case that shows the obstacles that state-owned enterprises (SOEs) face as they try to complete the bankruptcy process, Caixin Online reported. In the plan, the firm's bankruptcy administrators proposed auctioning, presumably at a discount, not only the equity stakes the parent has in its seven subsidiaries but also the debts that the subsidiaries owe to the parent, according to several of the firm’s creditors who voted on the bankruptcy plan on Oct. 28.

U.S. buyout firm KKR & Co is no longer in the bidding to buy Takata Corp, the Japanese parts maker at the center of the world's biggest auto recall, according to a person briefed on the bidding process. KKR did not attend meetings last week between bidders and the carmakers key to Takata's survival, the source told Reuters. The four other bidding groups include Bain Capital, a U.S. buyout firm that teamed up with Japanese chemical maker Daicel Corp, sources have said.

Shares in Monte dei Paschi di Siena fell 6 per cent in early trading on Wednesday, triggering an automatic trading suspension, after the withdrawal of an alternative rescue plan for Italy’s third largest lender, the Irish Times reported on a Reuters story. Veteran Italian banker and former industry minister Corrado Passera withdrew his plan for Monte dei Paschi on Tuesday, accusing the bank of obstruction and ignoring the interests of its own shareholders.

Venezuela, which has the largest crude reserves on the planet, has defied predictions of default since the oil collapse started in 2014, and analysts are split as to how long the nation of 30 million can hold out. With that in mind, Bloomberg is taking a close look each month at some of the key components that may determine its fate. After weeks of tense negotiations, state oil company Petroleos de Venezuela said last week that creditors holding $2.8 billion of bonds that come due over the next year agreed to extend maturities.

The National Asset Management Agency (Nama) expects to reduce its direct operating costs by €36 million in 2017 as it continues to wind down its activities. The agency has budgeted €72 million for these costs for next year compared with €108 million for 2016, a reduction of 33 per cent, the Irish Times reported. It also expects the number of debtor connections to have reduced to 150 or fewer by the end of this year from about 800 in 2010 when loans began transferring to it from domestic banks.

A succession of asset bubbles has formed in China, caused by a torrent of speculative money sloshing from stocks to bonds to commodities, The Wall Street Journal reported. The biggest apparent bubble is in housing, but prices have surged for niche assets, too, such as calligraphy, antiques and art. In May, futures prices for soybean meal, used as pig feed, jumped 40%. The trading volume of 600 million tons was nine times higher than China’s annual consumption. The pipe-making material PVC is up 40% so far this year on the Dalian Commodity Exchange.

Canada Finance Minister Bill Morneau pledged Tuesday to spend additional billions of dollars in infrastructure for the remainder of this decade and beyond as the Liberal government presses ahead with fiscal policy to lift moribund growth, The Wall Street Journal reported. The finance minister issued the details in the government’s fall economic update. The expenditures are necessary to mitigate the fallout from a slow-growth global environment and the hit to Canadian incomes from the commodity-price swoon, he said.